


We Are Stars

by messyfeathers



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Afterlife, Existential Angst, Friendship Is The Best Ship, Gen, Post-Episode: e030 Dana, Terror of the Void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 01:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1153243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messyfeathers/pseuds/messyfeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The nebulous semi-existence of being trapped in the void isn't so terrifying as long as you know you're not alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are Stars

Singing.

The warm melody is the first sound Earl has heard in weeks - excluding his own hoarse prayers to a deaf deity he stopped believing in the day he was dragged into the dark recesses of his new life.   _Life_.  Existence is a better word, since he isn’t sure he’s actually alive at all anymore.  The melody wavers uncertainly in the still air, then flickers out.  

“Please,” he rasps into the darkness.  In the inky black, it isn’t clear who he is addressing, but after the indeterminate stretch of absolute loneliness, he can’t bear the thought of losing the voice to the void.  “Please don’t leave.”  Instead of passing footfalls or an absorptive silence, there comes a sharp intake of breath and a shocked, wordless squeak.  Afraid of scaring the entity away, he holds his breath.  

“Who’s there?”

“Earl Harlan.”  His voice is tight and ragged from days - _weeks_ \- of neglect.  The voice in the dark is sweet and clear.  The singing must keep it practiced and smooth.

“Earl Harlan the scoutmaster?  What are you doing in here?” she asks.  

“I was dragged here.  Two in my troop graduated into Eternal Scouts.  The ceremony got out of hand.”  The newcomer gives a little humming sound in reply as if being dragged out of existence is a mundane occurrence in life.  Earl can’t remember if it actually is or not.  Life seems to be a distant, foreign concept he can’t quite comprehend anymore.  

“Speaking of hands, reach yours out towards my voice,” she instructs.  He wonders if he should trust the voice, but with the alternative being endless silence, he pushes himself unsteadily to his feet and reaches out blindly in the darkness.  The voice keeps speaking as he struggles to find her.  “My name is Dana.  I got in through the dog park.  Well, I should clarify.  In the dog park, I found a door.  Through the door, I found a new dimension.  In the dimension, I stumbled into a hole and found _here_.”   

“You’re a station intern,” Earl recalls as his fingers collide with slightly chapped lips.  Out of instinct, he immediately pulls back.  “Sorry.”  

“No, do it again.”  He does as instructed, her hand catching his as it unceremoniously presses against her eyelashes.  “I _was_ an intern.  I’m sure by now they have placed my memorial marker in the break room.”  Her grasp on his hand is cautious, but steady as if she were almost as afraid of losing him as he is of losing her.  “I don’t mean to be forward, but I’m looking for a way out and wouldn’t mind a traveling companion.”

“You’re the first person I’ve come across in a long time. By all means, lead on.”  Dana eagerly links their fingers together and pulls him in a direction he assumes to be forward.  His head spins and his legs stumble weakly.  Balancing upright is a struggle - how long has he been sitting in the dark anyway?  “Are we going back?”  In life, he never entered the dog park, never looked in its direction, tried his best to never even think of it.  In the murky afterlife, the idea of setting their course with it as the destination still seems unsettling, though a preferable alternative to the present emptiness.  

“Of course not.  Going back would be useless.  Even if I could find the way, it only leads to a dead end.  There’s no escaping the dog park.  I was lucky.  And now trapped with a scout commander - wilderness survival is a pretty big part of your job.  Seems I’m lucky all around.”  They walk on, possibly in circles, but Dana is set in whatever direction they travel, never hesitating even for a moment.  With every step, Earl gains a bit more balance, remembers a little better the definition of forward motion.  Conversation seems a more instinctive tether for Dana than the death-grip of their interwoven fingers.  Her skin is clammy and her fingers twitch and fidget, but her words feel natural and almost lighthearted.  “How long have you been here anyway?” she asks as they wander onward.  

“I don’t know,” Earl admits finally.  “I used to try to keep track of time, but then I realized it doesn’t matter here.  There isn’t day or night.  There’s just...this.”  The words end in a sigh as he gestures uselessly to the endless dark.  “My last count was at six months.  I couldn’t tell you how long ago that was.”  

“And all that time by yourself?”  There’s a touch of pity coloring her voice now. Earl shrugs - more pointless gestures in the complete absence of light.  

“At first I had the kids - the mute ones and the few scouts who were taken too.  I would tell them campfire stories and talk about home.  We wandered in a chain reciting chants, practicing summonings, quizzing each other on different types of wildlife native to the desert.  I’d keep them talking, keep them thinking to keep them hopeful and make sure they were still with me.”  As the words leave his lips, it occurs to him that this is exactly what Dana is doing with him right now.  He tightens his desperate cling on her hand and continues stumbling after her.  “Eventually we all gradually got separated and lost.  For a while I wandered, calling for them.  I finally gave up because I was afraid I was only getting further away.  So I sat down and closed my eyes and waited for a very long time for a sound.  And then I heard you singing.”  

“Strange that we close our eyes isn’t it?  As if there were a world out there to block out.  When I was first here I tried for a long time to sleep, but I never could.  It’s odd to never feel hungry or thirsty or tired.  Existing.  That’s all this is.”  Her voice is drained of all warmth and color - a dismal gray to complement the tangible shade of the void all around them.  Suddenly he’s back with the kids on that first day after the ceremony, desperately reaching for any memory to share to ease the boundless emptiness.  

“After a week-long desert walk once, I was so hungry I ate a whole barrel of pickled plums from John Peters’ farm.”  Dana’s ensuing laugh reminds him of the tinkling windchimes hung behind his mother’s little house with the peeling blue paint on the edge of town.  She had always said the windchimes warded off evil spirits.  Dana’s laugh does the same to the oppressive weight of semi-existence.  That’s how they go on for hours, days, weeks - they can’t tell how long and they don’t try to estimate.  Memory after memory unfurl, painting each step across the darkness with the colors of a desert sunset, the taste of raspberry ice cream, the smell of freshly printed photocopies, and the sound of a song they have both forgotten all the words to.  Several times they separate momentarily by accident, only for one of them to latch blindly and desperately onto the other’s hand until both their knuckles go white.  They walk in a straight line through the dark, and Earl begins to think that he wouldn’t mind an eternity spent just walking next to someone through the emptiness.  He is just in the middle of describing his first experience trying to survive the night in the sand wastes without any purchased fire when he stops dead in his tracks.  

Light.

It is far in the distance, but it is there nonetheless.  Even from their remote vantage point, he can see it isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel from all the optimistic wives’ tales.  They approach the blue glow cautiously, allowing their eyes to adjust as gradually as possible.  Even the tiny pinprick of moonlight is enough to cause immediate pain after all the darkness.  Dana drops to her knees and presses an eye to the hole, briefly obscuring the dim glow.  

“It’s Larry Leroy’s home.  We’re at the edge of town,” she whispers.  Earl can’t quite make her out in the dark, but he can see movement and it startles him.  For all this time Dana has been a voice that found him and guided him onward - a hand in his that he never fully considered was attached to a breathing person with hair and knee caps and blood.  The shape that is Dana is moving rapidly now, shifting this way and that in a mad search.  “There has to be another,” she mumbles frantically, yanking Earl so harshly that he nearly trips after her.  In the distance he can see a faint glow that he assumes to be just his unadjusted eyes playing tricks.  As they approach the light grows and blossoms and separates until they’re standing in a field of stars - a hundred unique freckles puncturing the darkness beneath them, each glowing with ribbons of scattered moonlight.  Dana pulls him to the edge of an opening just wide enough to fit a person.  The soft glow from beneath is familiar and welcome.  For the first time in what feels an eternity, Earl can almost remember what it felt like to be alive.  He closes his eyes and breathes in the air and imagines the slightest evening breeze drifting through the opening.  Curiosity is what finally pries his eyes open.  

Dana is nothing he expects.  Her skin is dark as are her eyes.  The moonlight reflects off bits of silver and rhinestones embedded in her ears, her eyebrow, her nose, one side of her still-slightly-chapped lip.  Her hair is coiled into tight curls only discernible from the darkness where they are streaked an electric blue.  

“You’re beautiful,” he breathes without thinking.  The tone of surprise in his voice is unintentional, but she shoots him a strange look nonetheless.  “Not that I thought you wouldn’t be,” he corrects himself.  “It’s just some people’s outsides don’t match their insides.”  She raises an eyebrow at him.  “Yours do.”  Her fingers begin to twitch again, instinctively loosening against his hand.  

“I’m flattered, but I was under the impression you and I were swinging in polar opposite directions.”  Even in the dim glow of starlight, Earl is still afraid if she lets go the darkness will pull him back in.

“We are.  All I meant was it’s nice to see a friendly face,” he explains.  Dana immediately relaxes again, nudging him with an elbow.  

“Your face isn’t so bad either, friend,” she offers with a grin.  Earl glances around at the cavern, looking for any sign of a wall or a ceiling in the new light.  

“How big is this place that light can’t reach the edges and shouts don’t even echo?”

“Infinite,” Dana shrugs.  A desperate panic grips at his stomach as he is suddenly acutely aware of how much he can’t go on semi-existing.  Traveling through the dark with Dana had been tolerable because he had hope that they would eventually find something.  Now that they had found something, the idea of stumbling on through infinite darkness for an eternity sounds impossible. “Look,” Dana whispers, pulling him from his hopeless spiral.  Dropping to her knees again, she peeks over the edge.  Earl joins her, desperate for a world he can recognize.  “We’re above the Arby’s.”  The red neon sign provides a stark contrast to the faint glimmer of the streetlights.  Far below, a lonely car drifts along the highway, its occupants oblivious to their celestial surveillance.  Earl can feel the suffocating weight of the void all around them.  

“What do you think would happen if we just dropped through?”

“It feels like jumping off of solid sky at first, then flying, then the gravity shifts and you fall the last few feet to the ground.”  She catches his inquisitive look and explains, “I found one of these openings before and got curious.”  

“What is it like down there?”  Instead of the wistful expression he expects, Dana’s face grows troubled, the shadows from the glow obscuring her eyes.  

“Dead.  I know from here it looks alive, but down there it’s empty.  All the people you love - you can’t see them and they can’t see you.  Buildings and streets you recognize are missing, whole neighborhoods are gone like the house in Desert Creek that doesn’t exist.  It’s maddening and it’s lonely.  I don’t know how I would have tolerated it if I hadn’t called Cecil.”  Earl’s breath hitches slightly.  Despite his best attempts, he can still taste the jealousy on his tongue with each word he asks.  

“You were able to talk to Cecil?”

“Yeah.  He helped me focus.  Something about his voice is always so calming.  It makes me feel like everything is okay, like I can be brave.  Does that make any sense?”  Earl nods.  He can remember a hundred nights spent listening to the radio to hear that voice say that everything would be okay.  In fact, he would trade the remainder of his indefinite existence to hear that voice say those words to him once more.  “Cecil got me through some rough times in high school,” Dana continues.  “The show, the way he speaks, the things he says - it reminded me that I wasn’t alone.  That’s why I became an intern.  I wanted to do whatever I could to help the show reach other lost, lonely kids like me who felt like they didn’t belong.”  Dana’s head drops, her curls bouncing in a dry laugh.  “I try to make the world a better place and now look at me.”  Earl exhales with relief at the shift in topic.  

“I was trying to save the lives of my scout troop when I wound up here.  Maybe this is heaven,” he shrugs.  They both laugh at the suggestion as they push themselves to their feet.  There’s a moment of mesmerized silence as they watch the lights of Night Vale far below.  Finally, Earl manages the question that refuses to stop echoing through his mind.  “Dana, are we ghosts?”  She reaches for his hand, the familiar feeling of her smooth fingers against his scarred, calloused palm reassuring after all this time.

“No,” she says softly.  “I think we’re stars.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think everyone who disappears will eventually find each other. And that maybe being dragged out of existence just means being dragged into a new kind of existence. Also: I've never really written Dana so I'm not entirely sure how I wanted her to turn out. But I think I kinda like it. :)


End file.
